USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Summary Statement of Research Interests

• Géraldine Fiss is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Southern California and received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 2009. She is interested in tracing the cross-cultural nexus of forces that influence literary, cultural and cinematic production in modern China and throughout East Asia in the early modern, modern and contemporary periods. In particular, her research illuminates the ways in which Chinese poets, writers, thinkers and film-makers synthesize modern Western impulses with classical Chinese aesthetics to create new, distinctly Chinese modern (and modernist) works and philosophical ideas. Her dissertation, entitled “Textual Travels and Traveling Texts,” examines encounters between Chinese intellectuals of the late Qing/early Republican (1860-1911) period and German culture, literature and thought. She also delineates innovations in Chinese fiction and literary theory that took place in the early modern period, as well as intellectual/aesthetic connections between late Qing, Meiji Japanese and late 19th/early 20th century European writers. In her current research, she is focusing on modernist and contemporary Chinese poetry and the trans-cultural influences that inform it. In addition, she studies and teaches the genre of the fantastic in modern East Asian literature and film, problems of translation and modernization in East Asia, the feminine as a counter-discourse to Chinese modernity and eco-aesthetics in contemporary Chinese and East Asian literature and film.